


a wild thing like this

by fallingflurry



Category: Mafia (Video Games)
Genre: M/M, Mafia III, a little bit of closeted gayness but not a lot, a touch of homophobia, some vaguely graphic very bizarre dirty talk?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:53:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28095732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallingflurry/pseuds/fallingflurry
Summary: He doesn’t think the anger is something he carried with him from Vietnam. He doesn’t think it was burned into him by that fire, by that bullet. It is just something that a man like him in a place like this accumulates. (The mud and the water and New Bordeaux on top of it, teetering into some familiar open mouth.)What he’s saying is that his response to this is not unreasonable, he is not unreasonable. Burning Marcano and everything his hands have touched to the ground is what anyone would do, although maybe not everyone would be this good at it. He can’t help it that he’s so good at it.
Relationships: Lincoln Clay/John Donovan
Kudos: 15





	1. John

Lincoln Clay is what John thinks a natural soldier looks like. He is beautiful, to watch, moving through the Vietnamese underbrush. Watching him kill is mind blowing. Killing isn’t difficult, not really. Killing is raw and easy, but doing it that efficiently, that _well_? It’s a skill you can’t just learn. He was made to do this, and John feels like he was made to watch him do it.

In New Bordeaux, Lincoln walks with his hands clenched tight, always. As if his hands just form that shape, even without the heaviness of the gun against his palm.

\--

The other men most often simply call him _Big Guy._ As in _Sure, big guy_ or _Hey, big guy._ It makes him seem surprisingly benevolent, softens him. It’s the name John knows him by first, a nickname which tricks him into underestimating him.

“So what’s his deal, then?” he asks his officer, believing for a shameful minute that this giant can’t possibly deliver what his officer had promised him. The man just smiles. Afterwards, when he has seen what he can do, he thinks of that smile again. They aren’t excited for quite the same reasons, but close enough.

\--

By the time he is transferred to John’s part of the country, to do John’s sort of work, John gets the feeling Lincoln knows how to handle almost anything that damp, hot country and all its soldiers can throw at him. It’s not only because John wants to fuck him that he recommends him to the CIA, of course not, although all that is so tangled up in his head that it doesn’t really matter. Does it matter if he wants to fuck him or if he just wants to keep watching him fight? Either way he would fucking die for him. He realizes that slowly over several months, but the emotion never really changes from the first time he sees him pull those soldiers out of battle, bleeding and tired but unmoved by it.

“Well done,” John tells him afterward, and Lincoln shrugs, twenty one years old and already so goddamned good at this.

\--

“Smoke?” John asks him, and sticks the crumpled up packet out to him. The big guy takes a cigarette and John passes him the lighter. He moves smoothly, like a nice shot of bourbon burning its way down his throat. John asks him about his experience, just to have something to talk about. John does love to talk, but he also wants to hear this guy say more than two sentences. He gets barely that. He listens to the southern drawl give his credentials. Lincoln is smart enough to play stupid most times and John can hear that he accentuates the accent less now, sounds less like a hick now.

“So, big guy,” he asks, “you ready for what we’re gonna do?”

“Absolutely,” Lincoln rumbles, with a serious nod.

\--

The rest of it is a mixture of the best of his memories and the worst and he doesn’t like to think about either. Lincoln Clay is involved in most of them, never as much what he wants as when he sinks his knife into some soft, welcoming throat.

(John can’t help himself, next time they’re on leave he goes out and finds the first hard, willing body he can find and closes his eyes and thinks of the damp darkness and the quick glimpse of that knife before it is engulfed. He’s fucked, he’s really fucked and he loves being this stupid.)

\--

John flirts, always, with everyone, because it gives him an easy excuse. He can try it out, see what response he gets and if that response is a guy chucking a beer bottle at him then he can say he’s making shit up, this is just what he’s like with everyone and really, what does that say about the other guy, if that’s the conclusion he jumps to? He’s an expert at toeing this line between camaraderie and courtship. Male camaraderie itself is ripe with it, this instinct to touch other men, to throw insults that are really invitations or invitations that are really insults. John knows language, body and otherwise, and knows how to use both.

Lincoln Clay gives him nothing, when he tries that, so he lets it go. It’s a crush. He can jerk off and leave it at that, leave this in this shit country with its shit people and unbearable heat and leave it at that, just leave all of it.

\--

They share insults, cigarettes, tents and plans for the future. Or John teases it out of Lincoln, who after a while seems guarded but appreciative of the attention. He makes a mental file of all of it. Dead dad, mom gave him up, lonely kid. Orphanage. Religion. (John can’t tell if that has made him naive or cynical, but in his experience those are the only two options.) He talks slowly and deliberately, choosing his words, about Sammy and Ellis, family in everything but blood. John draws his own conclusions about the (lack of) legality of their operations.

(These moments are tense. Some things you can’t go over like this, some types of intimacy don’t happen in situations like this, between people like them, and if they do they shouldn’t be thought about afterwards.)

“For a guy who talks so much you don’t say a whole lot,” Lincoln remarks one night, the sounds of the nature around them deafening. Lincoln’s whole body is tired, but a hum emanates from where their elbows touch through the fabric of their clothes.

“Aw, wanna get to know me?” John throws out, grins. “Talk about where I went to school over dinner, get to know my mom’s name?”

“Buy you a nice burger when we get back to the States, how about that?”. He’s hard to charm, but when John succeeds it’s even more satisfying.

“Sounds like heaven. Heaven being anything that doesn’t come in a fucking can,” John says, sucks on the cigarette until all of him is filled with smoke. “You know, that might be my least favorite thing about this communist shithole. That and the smell. And the damp. And-“

“This is what I mean, man. You’re changing the subject,” Lincoln says, still sounds amused, and with the next sentence he leans a little bit closer into him, a playful shove. “Where you from?”

“Oh, I sprung fully formed from the temple of the Statue of Liberty,” John says, squinting into the darkness of the trees.

“Oh, yeah? Fatigues and all?”

“Combat boots laced and helmet askew, baby. Anything else I gotta demand a burger as payment for. New Bordeaux got any decent burger joints?”

\--

Lincoln had seriously oversold it. He supposes the city is “alive”, as Lincoln had called it, alive in the same way a corpse teeming with maggots is. Rednecks, junkies and overbearing, hypocritical religion.

The priest hates him, which isn’t a surprise. John isn’t an easy man to like, he knows that, and he doesn’t need him to like him. He doesn’t want him to like him, this small town priest, the worst kind of father figure. It’s enough that he lets him in the house, lets him sit there and watch him. He doesn’t offer to help with the care, thinks that might be too strangely intimate, for all three of them. So he sits there, sneaks off to the hotel sometimes. He knows why he’s there and it’s not to coddle Lincoln.

(When the padre leaves to buy groceries or get some shut eye he runs his fingers across Lincoln’s face, up his cheek and towards his temple. He stops by the angry red wound, doesn’t dare touch it. He’s seen Lincoln get hurt before, even shot, but not like this. He’s never seen him look so weak before and he doesn’t like it.)

He wakes up, finally, when John isn’t even there. He comes back to the house and there he is, in the bed, brown eyes clear as day. He cries. John stands off to the side while the priest and him huddle up together and cry. This is a turf war and he’s losing.

\--

“You ready?” Lincoln asks. By this point John has stared at his sleeping face for so long the scar stretching around his skull doesn’t seem out of place anymore.

“I’ll be waiting in the car,” he says, with uncharacteristic seriousness. Lincoln didn’t even have to ask.

\--

John spends his days listening to so many people talking shit he feels like he’s going to vibrate out of his skin, alternating sips of bourbon, gin, coffee. He hesitates at drinking the water in this piece of shit city, can draw his own conclusions about where all this grime and all these bodies end up.

He dreams again of swollen bodies looking up at him from swampy water, bloated and distorted. (It’s an operation just like the one they ran over in Vietnam.)

He tries to avoid sleeping, just smokes and smokes until his whole body shakes and stings like it’s on fire, listens to these dipshits who think they’re in private gift wrap their deepest secrets for him like they’re fucking Santa Claus. It’s not the worst way to keep himself sharp.

Lincoln comes back to the hotel room with blood under his fingernails and a tired grin on his face. (It’s an operation just like the one they ran in Vietnam.) He looks so fucking beautiful John’s exhausted body can’t help offering up a slight jump in his hammering pulse.

“We’ve got the Hollow,” he says and John watches him smile for the first time in months. Fuck him sideways.

\--

One afternoon he comes back to the hotel room wincing, with his arm stiff and pulled tight against his body and John jumps up from his shitty little desk too eagerly because one look at that and every part of him wants to kill every cocksucker of a mobster in this hellhole.

“You alright?” he asks, instead of saying any of that.

“I’m fine,” Lincoln dismisses him and John instead walks him through the latest bit of intel he’s found out but Lincoln is obviously not fine. He leans over him, squints down at the notes and breathes strained breaths. Leave it alone, leave it alone, leave it alone.

“Who got you?” he asks as Lincoln lets out his third sharp puff of air, his jaw tense.

He hesitates a little before he tells him, “Marcano’s hit squad.”

“Hm. They dead?”

“Yeah.”

John nods. “Good. A few less lowlifes to worry about then. They shot you?”

“Usually they shoot at me, yeah. Why, you worried about me?”

“Gonna be hard to do what I have to if you’re dead,” John says, smile stretched across his face. He swings back to look at his notes strewn across the desk.

“Sorry,” Lincoln says from behind him and then strolls into the bathroom.

“You’re apologizing for getting shot now?”

“Yeah, wouldn’t wanna make you a widower, when you put it like that,” his voice sounds from the bathroom.

John smiles to himself and gets up from the chair, peeks in and up at Lincoln from the doorway to the bathroom. “Why are you rummaging around in my bathroom?”

“Thought you’d have something I could…” he trails off, staring at the contents of John’s bathroom cabinet, obviously wishing he hadn’t looked in the first place.

John gets him to sit down on the bed, take his dirty military coat off (Who does his laundry? John might stink of booze and cigarettes but at least he looks clean.) and strip away the makeshift, dirty bandage. This is also something you don’t talk about afterwards.

He enjoys touching him. Who wouldn’t enjoy touching this fucking Adonis though, he thinks. It’s only natural.

The bullet has just grazed him, flung the skin open. It’ll need stitches but it’ll heal.

“You’re fucking bulletproof,” John mumbles as he brings out his needle and thread.

“Real shitty kind of bulletproof,” Lincoln answers and John panics and pours the rest of his bourbon on the wound. “Jesus Christ,” he winces and pulls away from him. “Warn me next time.”

“Whatever you say, princess.”

\--

He drives around when he feels he might actually die inside that room, when staring at the color of that ugly wallpaper makes him want to puke. It clears his head, driving around the Hollow and then further up north towards Barclay Mills, stopping by the bridge to stare over the water at Marcano’s fucking casino, enjoying for once not melting in his suit. Enjoying not having all those voices echoing in his head. Not that this city can ever be quiet.

(He hears the chatter about Lincoln Clay, smiles to himself when the Marcanos get more and more nervous, those pieces of shit. Some of the lower downs, that have met Lincoln once or twice and work under Cassandra or the other ones, call him Mr Clay, and John’s chest swells, his head feels like one of those Thanksgiving postcards, a smiling family gathered around a swollen turkey, smiling, smiling.)

He wonders where Lincoln is, those nights. It makes more sense, his whole being, now that John has arrived in New Bordeaux. The man and the town share the same sort of ruthlessness.

He takes the long way back to the hotel, drives through downtown and the French quarter, spends fifteen minutes watching a hooker trying to get her hair just right in her pocket mirror and thinks that fuck he loves America, fuck he loves Lincoln.

\--

“Do you pray?” Lincoln asks in Vietnam. Then, John laughs in his face, but sitting there waiting for Lincoln to come back from killing Tony Derazio, he strongly considers it.

When he finally gets back, he doesn’t tell him that.

“You did it?” he asks, grinning. “You goddamn, fucking hero. Cheers!”

He raises his glass to Lincoln, half full and Lincoln staggers past him and lands in the bed which dares to creak in complaint.

“You’re not getting blood in my bed, asshole,” he says and shoves at him with his shoe.

“Don’t worry, it ain’t mine.”

“That’s worse, dipshit,” John yells and shoves at him again but Lincoln is too compact for him to even budge him. He’s starting to suspect calisthenics don’t actually do shit for his physique. On the other hand, practically the only person he sees in his intel cave is Lincoln and he could never compare to him. No amount of exercise is going to make him two heads taller.

He watches him spread out on his bed and breathes, excited for several reasons. He looks real good like that, on his stomach, burying his face in the sheets where John sleeps. His legs are too long for the bed and John bumps his feet as he walks away to the desk to get the bottle of mid range bourbon he’s been nursing all day. On purpose, but Lincoln doesn’t seem to notice or mind.

Lincoln mumbles something into the pillow when John nudges him to move over, and John smiles. “Yeah, let’s drink to that.”

“I said your bed smells like someone tried to set it on fire,” he turns to him, his cheeks still pressed up against his sheets. From where he’s sitting John can see his dark eyelashes, the stubble on his cheeks, the brown eyes. He looks happy.

“Yeah, well,” John says. If they’re going to torch the entire town they might as well start here. “As good a thing to drink to as any.”

“I’d rather toast the fucking look on Derazio’s face when I threw him out the window,” Lincoln says, takes the bottle and turns to his side. “You got new glasses since I last came around, or?”

“Who do you think I am, the pope?” he says, watches as Lincoln grins around the bottle. He has such a nice mouth.

John thinks about kissing that mouth too much. He wants to fucking eat him, put his mouth all over him, his teeth. The glint of a knife sliding into someone’s throat.

\--

He does kiss him, a few nights later, drunk as fuck. Too drunk to think too much about it. And not on the lips.

He presses his mouth to Lincoln’s arm, where the bullet wound is starting to scar. He can feel the tight skin against his lips and wonders if that’s what the scar on the side of his head feels like as well.

“You’re drunk,” Lincoln chuckles, tries very generously to give him an out. John doesn’t take it.

“I’m just kissing it better,” he murmurs instead and with his lips he feels goosebumps appear on Lincoln’s skin. He leans his face against his arm, buries his face in it like he remembers Lincoln doing with his sheets. They’re still there, the same sheets, he refuses to let the cleaning lady in, if this piece of shit motel even has one. They’re both on the bed. How did they both get on the bed, he thinks, before he remembers waking up from some drunken dreams to Lincoln gently nudging him and then picking him up, light as a feather, dumping him on the bed.

“You alright?” he asks now, and by his voice John can hear that he’s still smiling.

“Peachy,” he answers, grins. He wishes he had something stronger than booze. It wouldn’t be that hard to get his hands on it, not in this town. Instead he gets his hands on Lincoln, places one hand on his chest, tired.

Lincoln says nothing, not even when he moves it lower, presses it against his hard abdomen. Lincoln, softer when he’s younger or softer when he’s older, what’s best? Older, probably, still alive. Not actually real yet, that’s good. A fantasy, a dream, of an older Lincoln, in his thirties, or forties. He moves Lincoln’s undershirt up. His fingertips meet clammy skin and hair.

He can still back away, he knows that, say that he’s drunk, that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Denial is a hell of a thing. He’s never been a coward though, and he suspects Lincoln knows that. He cups his hand around him, and Lincoln sucks in a breath. He moves so quick when he brings his hand down on top of John’s, not doing anything yet but squeezing his hand. Lincoln can’t decide whether to push him away or not.

“We don’t have to kiss,” John says and looks at Lincoln’s face. “It’s not like I’m a fucking queer, we don’t have to do that.”

Lincoln stays quiet and looks so serious John might actually laugh. Instead he smiles, presses his cheek against Lincoln’s. His hand is still there, both of their hands are still there. He doesn’t dare move. Lincoln could break his arm with one move, but maybe it’s worth the risk.

He’s definitely a fucking queer, he thinks as he balls his other hand up into a fist. Lincoln’s grip on his hand is so tight now it almost hurts, his entire body is stiff and tight. John almost wants to apologize, but he does feel so good all tense like this.

“God, I wanna suck your dick until you fucking puke,” John murmurs against his shoulder and then the entire bed starts shaking. Lincoln pushes him off him and for a terrifying second John thinks he’s being rejected, starts listing off all the exit paths from the hotel room in his head.

“What the fuck?” Lincoln says between heaving laughter. “What the fuck does that mean? Until _I_ puke?”

“If you don’t know what I’m talking about you’ve never gotten a good blowjob,” John offers and Lincoln just keeps laughing.

“You’re fucking unbelievable,” Lincoln says and brings his hand up to John’s head, ruffles his hair as if he’s a kid, as if he’s the twenty three year old and Lincoln is the thirty year old CIA agent. No, that doesn’t make any sense either. “You should go to sleep.”

He does, somehow, even though he has Lincoln’s large, warm form lying next to him the whole night, something solid to cling to as he dreams murky, drunk dreams full of never ending mud. When he wakes up, Lincoln is gone but he has left a cup of bitter instant coffee on his nightstand, slowly going cold.

\--

He hears Lincoln coming, hears the heavy footsteps. That’s on purpose. Lincoln doesn’t make a sound usually.

So he’s giving him a head start then. Condescending. It makes John want to double down on it, just because. No guy is going to come to his hotel room and pretend to be nice and pretend to _cut him a break._ He doesn’t know how well John can play this game.

“Hey,” Lincoln says, leaning forward as he goes through the door, just to fit. John presses the headphones to his ear, waves his hand a little as he pretends to listen intently to Lydia Marcano screaming at her maid.

“She really is an insufferable bitch,” he mumbles and registers Lincoln’s vague frown out of the corner of his eye. “Yeah, yeah, whatever. You’re a gentleman, I get it, but it is true.”

Lincoln hovers somewhere to the right of him, doesn’t look uncomfortable unless you know what to look for.

“So, uh,” he says. “Came by yesterday and you weren’t here.”

“Went for a bit of a drive. Someone keeps messing with the wiretaps downtown, takes some tweaking. It’s fine, I can listen just as well from the back of the van.”

Lincoln nods, and lets John sit there in the silence. “Why, you think I’d start slacking off?” John pushes, wants to get angry at him. Jesus Christ, the thought of him punching John straight in the face makes his hands shake.

“Nah, but I thought…”

“Thinking, just like a big boy. What did you think?” John says, swivels around in his chair and looks up at Lincoln, standing there with his hands in his pockets, leaning against the closet door.

“Thought you might be avoiding me, after what you said is all,” Lincoln says with a little shrug. Is this a challenge or a punishment?

“I say lots of shit, man, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, leans back in his chair and stares him down. Is he going to dare to say something?

“Sure,” he says, staring back at him. “Just… I need to know you’ll do your job here. No matter what else is going on.”

“I’m here to take down Marcano,” John says with a grin that makes his whole face numb. “Fuck you if you think I’d let something get in the way of that.”

(He’s here to fucking die for Lincoln, in whatever way he’ll let him.)

“Fuck you too, man,” Lincoln says after a long pause, mouth slowly forming into a smile, directed down at the floor.

He hasn’t said no. Lincoln is one hell of a goodhearted man, but if ladies were his only interest, John doubts even he would be this kind right now. Well, if it’s the long game he’s gotten himself into, John is more than up for it.

\--

The long game turns out to be a little more than a month.

He hasn’t seen Lincoln cry other than way back during Lincoln’s convalescence, walking in on him and the priest huddled together, clutching each other, and it seemed so forbidden he backed out as soon as he saw it. But now he seems close.

“It’s my fault,” Lincoln says, and John feels like he’s gonna explode. Eventually he gets him back on track, turns that grief and doubt into anger, but it’s a close one. He can’t have Lincoln imploding on him.

“You want something to eat?” he asks Lincoln, points vaguely out the door with the fingers he doesn’t need to hold the glass.

“What you’re saying is you’re hungry,” Lincoln goes, not a trace left of that begrudging vulnerability that poured out of him a few minutes ago. Now he’s fired up, ready for the battlefield again.

“Yeah, might be,” he says, smiles around the cigarette.

Lincoln thinks for a second and then collects his gun from the desk, puts it back in his holster. “Sure. I’m driving.”

“Ah, come on. Don’t give me that shit about-“

“About you not being able to drive? I’d stop it if you learned to drive.”

“I know how to drive, fucker.”

“Alright, learned how to drive well,” Lincoln throws out behind him as he moves down to the car, some fast thing he’s stolen, or been given by Burke, who most definitely stole it. “And I’ll give this to you, I’m not counting tanks and planes and all that shit. That, you can drive fine. It’s just regular old cars on regular streets, you seem to have a hang up with that.”

John laughs as he sits in the passenger seat and watches Lincoln as he pulls out of the parking lot, leaned back in his seat with one hand on the wheel. You graze one streetlight and you never hear the end of it.

“Where are you taking us?” he asks and Lincoln makes a hard left.

“Figure you’ve already had a burger since getting back to the states so I’m taking you for the authentic New Bordeaux experience,” Lincoln explains as he practically creeps through the streets of the Hollow.

At first John doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but then he remembers. Sure. He sits in silence, for once, and waits to see where Lincoln takes him.

Lincoln being alive is no longer a secret. The people of the Hollow know who their new boss is, they know who he is and why there are no more drug dealers slinging dope on every street corner anymore, why there aren’t any more gruff mob men running around demanding protection money. Cassandra’s men deal out some weed, yeah, but that’s nothing to what the dixie mafia had going on. So the woman in the little corner dive bar where Lincoln takes him welcomes Lincoln with both arms open, John less so, but still with a smile. He wouldn’t trust a white man in a suit stepping foot in here either.

They’re still serving food even though it’s late and Lincoln orders for the both of them, makes small talk with the waitress. John learns this isn’t new, that Lincoln Clay is well known in this place. That he used to come here a lot before the war, accompanied by that foster brother of his. Adorable.

Maybe they weren’t still serving food because it takes an hour to get it, maybe they opened up the kitchen again when they heard who was eating. Lincoln pretends not to notice all this, but John can tell he’s proud. Just as proud as John is when he hears the Irish call Lincoln sir, or Scaletta’s men call him mister.

He deserves this.

“You like it?” Lincoln asks, tucked away in the booth in the corner, his back to the wall. It’s all he asks when they eat, nothing at all about the deal they had, that he’d buy him dinner and he’d tell him something, anything, about himself.

“Fuck me,” John answers, mouth full of collard greens and mac and cheese. “Yeah.”

“Soul food,” Lincoln says, follows it up with nothing but silence and a swig of his beer.

\--

“This ride is nice, where’d you grab it?” he asks, his hands running over the smooth leather of the car seat. It smells old, but drives like a dream. He can tell by how relaxed Lincoln seems, how he knows how the car acts.

“It’s mine,” Lincoln says, eyes on the road stretching out ahead of him, the houses slowly disappearing and the roads going to shit. They pass a gathering of shanty houses, on their way to the furthest point of the Hollow, down to where the Bayou begins. That muddy smell is growing stronger.

“Oh, yeah? Sorry, man, I assumed-“ John says, realizing the silence in the car is meant to be filled by him apologizing.

“Yeah. It’s fine,” Lincoln says, throws a little look at him. “I got it from Sammy, way back when. My first real car.”

“Oh,” John just says, isn’t actually good with sentimentality. “It’s nice,” he repeats.

They ride in silence for the rest of the way, passing nothing but dark, dank growth and small little houses scattered here and there. This is the stuff of nightmares, it really is. It’s too much like Vietnam. He wonders if war felt like coming home to Lincoln.

He drives into the driveway of the old plantation house where he has the meetings with his partners, turns the key in the ignition and then they sit there as the car cools down.

“Hey,” John says and Lincoln almost jumps.

“Sorry,” he says. “I wanted to show you something,” he sighs, gets out of the car. “Been, uh, been thinking about taking you out here for a while.”

The air out here is clear, the stars visible through the wispy clouds. He wonders why Lincoln wants to do this, if he knows what he’s doing at all. That last thought makes his heart thud so loudly he barely hears anything else.

Lincoln leads him around the house and then further away, to the edge of the water. There are some structures by the water, boat houses, and Lincoln swings the door open to one of them. The dock makes a U-shape, three walls surrounding them but open to the water. In the middle there is a decrepit old boat tied, floating in the thick, dark water.

Lincoln pulls a bottle out of his jacket and sits down furthest out towards the water and John, not knowing what else to do, sits down next to him. The wooden dock is cold and unsteady, but he trusts Lincoln’s judgement.

“This place is haunted, you know that?” he asks, takes a swig and then offers the bottle up to John who for once isn’t nursing a cigarette.

“I heard something about that, yeah,” he says and drinks. Not as nice as the bottle he has in his hotel room, but he doesn’t comment on it.

“Went here with my first girlfriend,” Lincoln murmurs and John hides a smile with his hand.

“A haunted house? You romantic motherfucker,” he answers and Lincoln looks down at his feet, almost touching the water. Normally he would have joked about this being a date, but it might actually be a date and maybe he’ll scare Lincoln off if he says anything. Or maybe not saying anything is scaring him off? Shit. He reaches for his packet of cigarettes and lights one, coughs like a goddamn sixth grader taking his first puff.

“She liked it,” Lincoln says simply and they sit staring out at the water. “Popped my cherry right over there,” he says and points loosely to somewhere behind them, a bit more secluded.

“Gotta say, Lincoln, this place looks like a shit place to fuck,” he says, mostly to tease him and because his head swims with the thought of Lincoln, naked, here on the wooden boards. He laughs at Lincoln’s affronted face.

“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Lincoln says and shoves at him so hard that he drops his cigarette right in the muddy, stinking water.

“Fuck off, dickhead, you made me lose my-“ he says, reaches down to somehow fish it out of the water but then Lincoln’s hand is around his wrist and he loses track of what he was going to say.

John can feel himself freeze up. Well, this wasn’t the reaction he thought he’d have, choosing between fight or flight or freeze, fuck or fuck or _fuck_. He sits there, closing and opening his mouth, feeling too aware of everything. In the distance they hear a motorboat whizz by, can see the lights way out across the water.

“I don’t really know how to do this without kissing you,” Lincoln says, his voice steady. He doesn’t sound scared at all. Okay, so this is a date.

“What?” John asks, his heart racing. Maybe he’ll just die here. That would be fine with him.

“You said that-“ Lincoln continues and suddenly John’s brain jumps into action.

“Oh, yeah,” he says. “Oh, yeah, no. That was just-“

Lincoln lets go of his wrist, shifts a little closer. Fuck, John can smell him. He smells so good, like sweat and mud.

“Yeah, okay,” he says as Lincoln pulls his military jacket off and then stares at his upper body in its white wifebeater. John wishes he’d put something on other than this sweat drenched shirt.

He remembers that jacket, he remembers seeing Lincoln for the first time in it, seeing Lincoln for the first time in general. Is that what Lincoln is thinking about?

Lincoln looks up at him and then presses his lips to his. Lincoln’s hand on his back is heavy and warm and so large. That touch alone is pornographic. Lincoln pulls away and John is left staring at him, at his lips and his eyelashes, his hair and his skin. It’s sickly sweet with how romantic it is. John feels like a child stuffing cotton candy in his mouth until there’s nothing left but that sticky, overwhelming sweetness.

“Goddamn, you’re fucking pretty,” he says, and Lincoln smiles.

“Thanks,” he says awkwardly and John grabs at the front of his shirt.

“Do it again,” he says, maybe too intensely, and Lincoln laughs. He’s pressing so close to him now he’s almost in Lincoln’s lap.

“Calm down,” he murmurs, still smiling. Teasing. He’s teasing him.

“Fucking kiss me, pussy,” he says against Lincoln’s lips and then does it himself, grabs the back of Lincoln’s head. Jesus Christ. He’s very good at it, at kissing, although surprisingly tender. Is this how he kisses women? John wants him to fucking grab him, he wants Lincoln to tear him apart.

“Why didn’t we do this in the hotel room? Why’d you have to bring me to a cold, haunted dock to do this?”

“Wanted to show you a good time,” Lincoln says and sounds so sincere that John wants to crawl inside him. “Do something nice. I don’t really… get to do that these days.”

“Trust me, I would have had a good time in there too. Also, there’s no lube here, is there?” he asks, ignoring the emotion in Lincoln’s voice, definitely in Lincoln’s lap now. Fucking is what hotel rooms are for, doesn’t Lincoln know that? Lincoln pulls away, frowns.

“Nah. Should I have… brought that?” he asks, and it’s the sweetest thing in the world.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says, breathing harshly against Lincoln’s mouth. “I wanna fucking crawl inside you, I want to eat you like a steak, I wanna cut you up in to tiny goddamn pieces. You need to let me blow you or I’m gonna fucking die.”

He barely knows what he’s saying. Usually he manages to shut the fuck up in situations like these, or someone else shuts him up, but he knows Lincoln can take it.

“Jesus Christ,” Lincoln says, his lips warm and soft. His hands close tight around John’s wrists and twists them away from him. A fight, a goddamn fight. “You wanna do this here? I didn’t plan on us actually… fucking, out here.”

“You don’t know me at all, sweetheart,” John says, laughs. “You gonna let me go? It’s gonna be real hard to do this otherwise.”

“Fine, asshole,” Lincoln says, and lets him go, opens the button on his jeans, pulls down his fly just enough to scoot his pants down a few inches.

John reaches out almost reverently, puts his hand on his stomach again and then slides it down, just like that night in the hotel room. The wifebeater is damp with sweat and his skin underneath is warm. Lincoln sucks in a breath when he slides his hand under the edge of his boxers and then further down. His fingers meet curls and then the base of his dick, so warm it feels like he might catch on fire just from touching him.

“Fuck,” he says, his mouth suddenly dry and empty. He might be saying more than that, rambling, loud and inarticulate, but he doesn’t actually know anymore. He holds him and it feels right. More satisfying than a gun, even, than feeling the safe weight of it and the smell of metal and then squeezing the trigger and watching the aftermath. Better than all of that. He feels powerful.

Eventually Lincoln gently loses patience with him just holding him like that so he wraps his larger hand around John’s and squeezes and then gets him to move.

“Harder,” he says, but John is already leaning down, his mouth open and wet and full. He sucks in, hollows his cheeks and hears Lincoln let out a hissing noise in response.

His jaw is going to start to hurt, so he eases off him and uses his tongue, shapes it around him. The angle is awkward, but it lets Lincoln easily lean his heavy arm on his back. He feels enveloped, like Lincoln is everywhere he turns, surrounding him.

The water makes a clucking sound in time with the noise John’s mouth makes as he moves up and down. A wet, soft noise, obscene. Like the most dirty porno John can think of. Like finding his dad’s dirty magazines in the back of his parents’ closet, shoved behind the boxes of shoes, and touching himself for the first time. It never felt forbidden, funny thing, and this doesn’t either. It feels right to do this here, with that muddy smell in his noise blending with the taste of him. Out in the open.

His childhood bedroom with its windows looking out over the park, his smoke filled hotel room in this goddamn city, the wet tents in Vietnam, Lincoln, they’re all the same. They all kill him in the same way.

Lincoln is breathing harshly through his nose. John can feel it against the back of his head, hot, and then Lincoln’s hand, also hot, pressing down gently. He doesn’t have to be so gentle, but John isn’t going to complain.

When Lincoln comes in his mouth he says, murmurs, “Oh, fuck, baby,” and John feels the release through his entire body, feels them both relax as Lincoln slumps backward against the wood and John eases off him. Lincoln lies back, broad back flush against the wood as John brings his hand down to the water and drags it across his mouth before wiping his hand on his slacks. Mouth, hand, wood, water.

“Yeah, alright,” Lincoln admits. “Alright. That was good. I’ll give you that.”

“What did I tell you?” John grins. “I am one talented cocksucker.”

Lincoln lets out a rumbling laugh, runs a hand across his face and then through the short curls on his head. “Yeah, man. Yeah, you are.”

\--

Lincoln doesn’t touch him that night, other than kissing, but John knows it’s a slippery slope. Once you get your dick sucked you’ll be back for more, that’s a motto he lives by.

Lincoln does kiss him goodbye in the car outside the darkened motel, though, the streetlights spilling down across his skin, makes the light brown look orange. John tells him again how fucking beautiful he looks, and Lincoln grins at him and leans across him to open the door.

\--

It’s awkward, sure, and sometimes not awkward at all. He catches Lincoln lingering outside his door, clutching what’s just a smoldering cigarette butt by then. He looks deep in thought.

“You coming in or are you just gonna stand around and look shady? Because the hotel staff already hates me, you wouldn’t be doing me any favors.”

Lincoln looks down at the ground and then flits the cigarette butt off the balcony, takes a step inside the door. “Oh, why would they hate you? You’re so pleasant.”

“Fuck off,” John says and then turns around to find that Lincoln has followed him all the way into the middle of the room, is standing tall two inches from his face. “Jesus Chr-“ he has time to say and then Lincoln is on him, grabs his jaw gently and slowly and kisses him. “Woah, thanks,” John says when he breaks free, wipes his mouth as if that will somehow wipe off the embarrassment at being so affected by Lincoln touching him with this amount of tenderness.

“You’re welcome,” Lincoln says into his shoulder. He has to lean down to reach, and his head is heavy. “How you been?” he asks as he floats over to the desk to peek at the papers scattered there and leaves John swaying all alone in the middle of the room.

“Good. Found some real good, uh, some real good informants for you in Frisco Fields,” he stutters, lights another cigarette. “How, um, how are you?”

Lincoln looks strangely at him, tilts his head a little. “I’m fine, brother. Really, you alright?”

John just frowns and nods frantically, fills his lungs with smoke.

“Are you freaking out? I thought you… Thought that you would know how to do this,” he says, shifts his weight from one foot to the other, his hand splayed out on the desk. He doesn’t look as jumpy and self conscious as John feels and no doubt looks, but he’s a bit off his game.

“Sorry to disappoint. I’m no one’s fairy god mother,” he mumbles. “Certainly not yours.”

“Don’t clam up on me.” He looks sad, and John sure as shit can’t bear to let him down, so he shakes it off, whatever it is.

“You’re right, I’m being an asshole.”

“Surprise,” Lincoln smiles, and kicks his foot out at him. The smile fades as he stares steadily at him. “I just want to know we’re still good. That we can still do what we set out to do here. And that you still, I dunno…” He trails off with a shrug.

“We are. I do,” John says, serious. He’s never been more serious about anything in his life, except maybe setting foot on US soil again after Vietnam, maybe that phone call when his dad was in the hospital that last time, staring down at the yellow linoleum floor of the kitchen, the phone cold and unmoving in his hand.

“Good,” Lincoln says, and he smiles, and he reaches out a hand and touches John’s face, like no one has done before. John sitting down, Lincoln standing, cradling his jaw in his palm, certain and heavy. There are a lot of things Lincoln can do with his hands.

\--

John doesn’t care how either of them started, how either of them will end. He cares about now, maybe, _maybe_ , as far as the next meal, the next sleep. But he’s not much for plans, or regrets, or things bigger than himself or beyond the limited, slanted sense of right and wrong he has created for himself or was born with.

When Lincoln comes back to the motel after killing Marcano, tired and relieved and still angry, he knows with more certainty than ever that that he is right in that. He and the Padre do agree on these two things, that Lincoln has so much potential he is vibrating with it, and that things like these, causes like these, lives like theirs, simply do not end.

But if he will think of the future, just this once, he thinks of the sunset, a boy in a suit on a horse in a country movie. It will smell like dust and sweat and gunpowdery metal and there will be a horizon to ride into and he and Lincoln will do just that. The saddle will be comfortable and the sun on his face will be warm.


	2. Lincoln

When he meets John Donovan he can tell that he’s been watching him, by the quirk of his head and by something in his eyes. Unsettling, but something he has gotten used to, being appraised and talked about like a tool. (A weapon, a bullet, the fire, the knife.)

The other soldiers talk about him, John, like they’re scared. Lincoln knows that kind of scared, that kind that they muffle by pretending to be amused. They call him _agent,_ they call him _Ivy League_. They can tell that he’s messing with them, offended and angry, but they can’t quite tell what the joke is. They do that, sometimes, to Lincoln as well. Pretend he’s stupid, but let him play pretend at corporal, let him lead the others, all at their convenience and because they’ve allowed him. A different kind of control, he supposes, and he lets them underestimate him, is fine with them underestimating him. A man like Lincoln needs to be under control.

John doesn’t seem scared of Lincoln. John tells him good job and offers him a cigarette, and grins at him. His other superiors don’t look at him like this. His other superiors don’t smile like that. John doesn’t want him to be under control at all. When they eventually work together, Lincoln can tell that he was right, that John isn’t scared. John is guarded, at first, and then fascinated and then a friend.

A long way away from this, during the long months that Lincoln spends in a feverishly warm bed, a shadow of the fire that put him there, he dreams of John’s eyes the first time he saw them, blue and clear like the ocean, not at all the muddy grey and green and brown of New Bordeaux’s veins.

\--

A long time ago, at Saint Michelle’s, Father James told him and the other kids about Moses, the basket, the river, the waves. For a long time, he dreamt about that, a woman at the riverside, giving her child to the water, and after a while, of course, the woman in his dreams is his own mother, giving him to the water just like Jochebed did. He imagines her, faceless but dark, just like he is, at the waterside, giving him to something bigger than herself because she herself knows she is too small.

\--

Lincoln is not an angry guy. He’s just a guy, whose life blew up. The ashes of his family’s bodies seeping into what’s left of their house. Lincoln is angry, yes, but not being angry would be insane.

He doesn’t think the anger is something he carried with him from Vietnam. He doesn’t think it was burned into him by that fire, by that bullet. It is just something that a man like him in a place like this accumulates. (The mud and the water and New Bordeaux on top of it, teetering into some familiar open mouth.)

What he’s saying is that his response to this is not unreasonable, he is not unreasonable. Burning Marcano and everything his hands have touched to the ground is what anyone would do, although maybe not everyone would be this good at it. He can’t help it that he’s so good at it.

\--

He wakes up in Father James’ house, in a bed he doesn’t know, in a room he doesn’t know. His head feels like it’s splitting open, like a seam he didn’t know about has unravelled as he slept. He touches the scar carefully with rough fingertips, traces it around his skull. It feels like it might never end, the scar, like it will just continue, spread, spill out into the room, onto the street.

“It’s healing nicely, Lincoln,” his priest says, and Lincoln barely hears him.

\--

“What do you want to accomplish with this, Lincoln?” Father James asks later. He looks sad. He looks disappointed. He doesn’t understand that this needs to get done. “What is it that you want?”

Lincoln can still feel Ellis’ hand slapping his back as he laughs, he can still smell Sammy’s cigars. He can still run his fingers over the worn out embroidery of his name on the green of his army jacket. He can remember standing in an open doorway and watching Perla take her shoes off, rub the heels of her feet, and then look up and spot him and smile. He thinks of the smell of bourbon and the silky feel of John’s hair against his palm and the warmth of his scalp and the shape of his relaxed, pink mouth, the slow movement from under his eyelids.

“When are you finished?”

John doesn’t say that. John might not understand exactly why Lincoln has to do this, but he understands beliefs and he understands the consequences of acting on them. He doesn’t ask Lincoln what they’ll do after they’ve finished this, he doesn’t ask anything. Lincoln says it has to be done and John trusts him. They both know that this isn’t a thing that ends. (Sammy on his stomach, quiet and quieted and still crawling towards some last ditch hope of turning the situation around.)

Father James says that if he doesn’t stop now, Lincoln will be different. Lincoln doesn’t think he will be different, Lincoln thinks he has been different all his life. There will always be more Haitians, Father James says. If it wasn’t the Haitians that worried Sammy, it would have been someone else. If it wasn’t Marcano that killed him, it would have been someone else. Sure, and Lincoln is the place where this bad thing ends. Lincoln is the end. There will be no more “would haves”, there will be no more “someone else”, Lincoln is the solid fine point where all these bad fates, bad men, bad deaths converge and he is the end to it.

\--

He can tell John wants to fuck him by the quirk of his head and by something in his eyes. He looks at him for too long, looks at the wrong points on his body, looks at him in the wrong way. Something wrong, in that way that has always seemed right, for Lincoln. First the guardedness, then the fascination and then the want. Lincoln can tell where this is going.

He likes having somewhere to go to, when the day is over. When he strings up Doucet in the Ferris wheel, he gets to come back to the hotel room, he gets to come home. (Father James thinks that this is what keeps Lincoln ticking, that he wants a home and a family. A man makes a home, a soldier has a family. When John Donovan concentrates, his forehead wrinkles in the exact same way that Perla’s used to when she sang to him and Ellis before bed, the bedroom window open to the discrete light and sounds of the street. She was the only kind of mother that Lincoln has ever had, and maybe John is another thing that Lincoln is surprised and grateful he gets to have. Lincoln doesn’t think Father James would understand this kind of family.)

Donovan isn’t asleep, he knows Lincoln will come back here tonight. He isn’t even in bed, even though it’s closer to morning than midnight when Lincoln walks through the door. He’s sitting by his desk, waiting for him, eyes closed, in front of the wall that keeps expanding, new pictures and red strings every time Lincoln visits, like an expanding map to Lincoln’s life and all the people responsible for how it has turned out. Lincoln can tell he’s waiting for him. His body jumps into motion when he hears him come in, his eyes opening and meeting Lincoln’s seriously and alertly. Lincoln missed him. Lincoln doesn’t ever want to leave this hotel room again. Lincoln smells like rank bayou water, the metallic smell of blood, so thick it’s almost a taste, sticking to his face, to his hair, filling his mouth until his tongue feels swollen.

“We’ve got the Hollow,” he says, and John opens his eyes, smiles, chewing on what’s left of a cigarette butt.

“What’d you do with him?” John asks, meaning Doucet, and when Lincoln tells him, he removes the cigarette butt from his mouth, looks hungry, looks like he might drool. “Good riddance, wish I could’ve seen it.”

“He’s still up there, pretty sure,” Lincoln says, smiles. “If you wanna take a look.”

He is. He stays up there for hours, until the cops can be sure the gunshots have died down, until they’ve been able to cut him down. (Marcano doesn’t understand who’s coming yet and cares little about Doucet, the cops he has in his pocket don’t care much about Doucet either, or the heroin he’s slinging mostly in the Hollow. They’ll find out.)

Lincoln doesn’t return to the fun park, so maybe they didn’t cut him down after all. Maybe he’s still up there, maybe he will always be up there, just like Ellis will always be burned.

\--

He goes on, he gets allies, lieutenants and capos. (It’s the same thing he did in ‘Nam.) The city may still be run by Marcano, but it is also teeming with distaste for him, with people just as motivated to sink a knife in Marcano’s chest as Lincoln is, and most of them can see Lincoln as the potential that he is.

Cassandra, a shifting tangle of secrets, wronged. Scaletta, a stranger but not a guest, wronged.

Burke, sad and drunk and dying. (Danny’s face, Danny’s body, his hair falling in Lincoln’s eyes as he carries him through Mardi Gras. Running his fingers over the leather seats, where Danny and Ellis were happy, fitting his hands over the steering wheel, still warm from someone else’s hands. Later, he kisses John Donovan in that car and afterwards he wonders what Danny would think of it.)

With more allies come more people who want to kill him, more grazes and bruises and cuts, split open skin and chipped teeth. John patches him up, fingers careful and slow. Lincoln guesses he could get access to whatever veterinary Cassandra has on the clock, or call Vito’s mob doctor, but Lincoln doesn’t like the vulnerability of that. Lincoln also can’t deny preferring John to a stranger. Lincoln has beds all over town to share with just as many potential partners to share those beds but the only place he feels safe is here. People often don’t think Lincoln is funny, but isn’t that a good joke? This wild thing in John, safe?

Lincoln watches him work to patch him up, immerses himself in the joke John takes forever to tell, which he is telling to distract them both, Lincoln from the pain and himself from something other.

\--

They talk about that other later, when they’ve touched each other. They both know, in different ways, what that feels like, the heaviness of it in the stomach and the joints and the hands, the bend of the head and the slope of the shoulders.

He tells John because John asks. Because they can talk about it. They lie next to each other in bed, John’s bed, tired and warm and if Lincoln closes his eyes he disappears, the sheets the same temperature as his skin.

A kid at the orphanage, Lincoln looking a little too long at his hands, the smug smile, the flick of the cigarette and the embers hitting the dry pavement, and then knowing, knowing he ratted him out to the others, being able to tell by how they look at him. That little spark of suspicion and suddenly he’s not one of them anymore. Suddenly he’s something other. Lincoln learns what his hands can do, that it isn’t more difficult to break bones than it is breaking sticks down by the riverbed, pretending to be fencing knights. This isn’t playing pretend, but the noise is the same, sick and wet and cracking. A broken arm and Lincoln is even more other, but at least he’s not a queer.

John listens, quietly for once. Then he says, “And after that?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean,” John says, collected and serious. Lincoln is 23 and none of those things. He has never talked about it like this and his body reacts to the feeling of danger like it always does, hands forming fists, heart pounding. John might be looking at him here, but Lincoln stares at the yellowing ceiling until he can’t anymore, until he closes his eyes.

“I guess,” he says, and he can hear John put his cigarette to his mouth, quietly fill his lungs with smoke.

Lincoln tells him about Giorgi Marcano, spoiled and bratty and ruthless, whom nobody actually likes, not even Marcano’s men, probably not even Sal Marcano, but who can joke and buy beer for you in the whites only shops and who was always a little more in the know about the grown up shit, who always seemed to know more than everyone else.

Giorgi, holding the gun, Giorgi looking straight at him, that night in the bar. Giorgi, whose idea it was to sell heroin in the Hollow, because it brought in cash and because no one, including him, cared all that much what happened to the Hollow. Giorgi, a friend, once, and now just another reason why this is all Lincoln’s fault.

“Lincoln, I know this is serious and all but that’s fucking funny.” John chuckles, the bed moving with his body, John’s face cracking up in a grin.

“It’s not.”

“Do you think Marcano knows? That you deflowered his first born? That Giorgi’s out here sullying the family name?”

Lincoln shakes his head.

“What a fucking Romeo and Juliet you two are, huh?” John says, breathing with his laughter, easing back down onto the pillow. “I can’t imagine that piece of shit touching you without losing his hands.”

“It wasn’t like that at all. We were friends.” They were lonely. Just the two of them, pretending they were other people, somewhere else. He tells John about that feeling, of being a tool. For Giorgi. Of Giorgi looking at him and touching him and knowing that what Giorgi sees and feels isn’t a person, not all the time, and if it isn’t all the time then it’s actually never.

The anger comes from being aware that he knew this already and spent time with him anyway. Lincoln was never naive. It comes also, from seeing first hand how the Dixies have treated the Hollow, and how Giorgi doesn’t give one single shit about it. The Hollow, that is his. Lincoln’s body, that is his. Lincoln’s home, that is his. (You can’t own a person, but you can own a thing.) Giorgi giving zero shits about either, not caring at all about the scar that Lincoln will always have, from Giorgi’s bullet from Giorgi’s gun. Later, when Lincoln sinks his knife into Giorgi’s chest, he at least cares enough to look Giorgi in the eyes as he does it.

\--

Lincoln lies in his own bed in the basement of Sammy’s and thinks about his body. Not a tool, not a thing, something else. He runs his fingers over the scar, from his temple to the back of his head, smooth and soft. New. His lower arm aches, from a man’s nails digging into the skin there, trying to pull Lincoln off him and failing.

What he does with John doesn’t leave marks like that, but he can remember where John has touched him and how, can mimic it with his own hands if he tries hard enough.

He thinks about God, about being created in the image of something or someone. He thinks about his father, as unknowable and absent as the previously mentioned. He doesn’t think either of them deserve a say in what he does with his life, his days, his body.

\--

John talks dirty when Lincoln fucks him. Very dirty, like Lincoln has never heard anyone talk before. Violent, bizarre stuff that is often too much to handle and often don’t make any sense, and that Lincoln most often doesn’t pay attention to. John once told him, in between rough breaths, that he wanted him to fuck him so hard he couldn’t breathe anymore, fill up his lungs with come until he ‘keeled over from pulmonary edema’ and after that Lincoln learned to just tune him out, watch the line of his neck when his mouth and everything inside it moves, the way his skin turns red and his chest heaves. He looks like he doesn’t know what he’s saying, like he’s possessed, moaning and clenching his teeth, and always this stream of barely coherent words leaking from him, if Lincoln doesn’t hold a hand over his mouth or tightens his hand around his neck. He likes that too, smiles at him when Lincoln does it, bites the inside of his mouth until he can’t do anything anymore but gasp for breath, until he slaps the side of Lincoln’s thigh to get him to let go. That smile, like this is a joke between the two of them, like they’re about to get to the punchline.

Does Lincoln feel like a tool then, when John Donovan looks up at him like he hung the fucking moon, eyes blue and body spread out like something Lincoln can dive into?

\--

Lincoln lies with one hand behind his head and watches as he gets into the shower, gets out, puts on his shirt and his underwear and the holster around his shoulder, watches him check the bullets in his gun and slide it into the holster, run a hand over his face to see if he needs to shave. He gets a call, the ring echoing rudely before he picks up the phone, and he listens intently, hovering close to his desk.

Lincoln likes being an observer. He was 13 when the Robinsons took him in and they were already a family, no doubt about that, and he learned by watching them what that meant. He remembers watching Sammy at a neighborhood barbecue, telling Ellis off for stealing a beer, more than he remembers tasting that barbecue, more than he remembers anything he said that afternoon. You can read a person so easily, most often, you can learn to mimic or to spot patterns, habits, weaknesses or strengths so easily because deep down Lincoln thinks people want to be known. Does Lincoln want to be known? Does Lincoln want to be watched? Is he afraid that if and when John looks at him there will be nothing there but anger and an empty uniform and two hands clenched so tightly into fists the shape and movement of the individual fingers don’t matter anymore? Let’s not think about it.

His hair is still wet, not just damp from sweat, but properly wet from the shower and Lincoln knows that if he got up from the bed and went over there and touched him, if he let his fingertips get wet, he would hang up the phone, he would drop everything and follow him back to bed. He has heard other people describe their women as pliant, and that isn’t what he means. John is far from that and Lincoln loves to be assured that John won’t budge.

He follows the line of his body up towards his neck, one long smooth line. He might not be pliant, but he is beautiful, and easily distracted.

“What are you looking at?”

\--

He supposes that being alive, truly alive, (the sun shining through his fingertips, the veins and the stem and the leaves, blood pouring and heart beating) means the same thing as being a person, being someone and in that respect he never feels more alive than when being watched by John. John lets him be soft, John lets him be rough, John doesn’t care either way.

John isn’t Giorgi, John doesn’t watch him move and see just a body. John isn’t Father James either, doesn’t see a soul, doesn’t watch him pray or beg or play and see a promise to someone that hasn’t ever cared even the slightest bit.

When he waits for John on a bench and sees him standing across the street, knowing that maybe he’s been there for minutes, watching him, Lincoln isn’t worried. If John is a mirror he is clean and cool and crystal clear and Lincoln likes the reflection in it.

\--

When he is done, when it is finished, when he can say the city is no longer Marcano’s because there is no longer a Marcano, there is nothing in his body but a tiredness that doesn’t end. A weariness he has never felt before, maybe came close to on the plane ride to the US, that stretches out in his body like something alive, wholly separate from him. The fight stays in him, the ache and the tiredness, reminders of what he has done, what has been done to him, aches of what will be.

In the car ride from the casino to the motel, he wishes for a lot of things. He feels Sammy, Ellis, Danny, a physical ache in him, the grief and loss new all over again. He has to sit for several minutes in the car, look at the Hollow, look at his hands, look at the light behind the drawn curtains in John’s motel room, before he walks up the stairs and into the room.

John is waiting for him, knew he would come back here, or just hoped, but either way Lincoln of course is here. He has two glasses brought out, and when Lincoln steps through the door he grins at him and pours from a bottle that Lincoln has never seen him drink from before, that from the glint of the glass and the shape of the label looks expensive.

“You did it,” John says, and he gives him the glass, warm hands, warm body.

“We did it,” Lincoln says, and John shrugs and smiles, looking bashful.

The whiskey is still in his mouth as he opens it to kiss him, and John is, for once, quiet and soft. Lincoln is never violent, not even when John clearly wants him to be, but he does use his size and his strength. John likes it when he puts his full weight on him, or presses him down into the mattress until he can’t breathe, until he can feel his body start to cramp from the pressure in his lungs and it is almost frightening.

But tonight it is one of those nights that Lincoln adores, and he can tell it is a gift that John gives him. John acts, or is, timid almost, lets Lincoln rest his hand on his lower back, pull him in against him, no rush. He just moans into Lincoln’s mouth when he touches him like he wants to be touched, and leads him into the shower, cleans the blood off him with careful fingers, watches for wounds or bruises or breaks, while Lincoln watches him.

They fuck, still wet from the shower, drenching the sheets, and when he watches John bite his lip to stop from babbling, sweet and flushed and adoring, he just wants to sleep. He just wants to stay like this, still and silent.

“Hey,” John tells Lincoln when the fight, the passion, runs out of him like blood and he stops moving in him, over him. With his mouth against John’s clavicle, he discovers the enormity of the life he has in front of him, the infinite amount of choices and forking paths he can take, the roads he can drive down with Sammy’s car, if he wants to. “You alright?”

“Yeah,” Lincoln says, after a little while, and he lifts his head. “Yeah, I’m good.”

\--

“What now, Lincoln?” Father James asks him. They sit together on the lawn chairs in the grass behind the house. Does Lincoln want him to be grateful, for what he’s done? Not for the bodies he has left behind, but for the drugs off the streets, for the freedom of so many people? Does Lincoln want him to approve?

Lincoln tells him vague plans, since he learned months ago that he would find no approval, no pride, there. He is not proud, he is not happy for him, he does not approve. Lincoln can tell by the way he looks at him, face relaxed and eyes sad, brows furrowing. He thinks Lincoln’s potential is limitless, which he hasn’t until the last year realized could be a bad thing.

“Are you at peace?”

This question comes later in the night, stars above them bright behind dark leaves. Lincoln sits quietly, for a long time. He has realized, before, maybe even as far back as when he strung up Doucet, that there will be a time when he does things because he can do them, not just because he needs to do them. He has done the things he needs to do, to be able to live in the world, live with himself, and now he needs to figure out what he wants.

He wants John, more than anything, but John is not something you build peace on. John is movement and intensity and waking up with cold sweats, Ellis laughing at him when he makes his bed up in the basement. A small part of him is grateful to Marcano, that Sammy and Ellis and Danny are memories, that they will not know him now. That he won’t ever have to see Sammy look at him the way Father James looks at him now.

He thinks about their graves, where they will rest, in peace, and doesn’t answer him.

\--

Before the meeting with the others, he brings John down to the boathouse and they watch the water. The basket, the river, the waves. It’s what he thinks about as he thanks John.

“You’re getting soft,” John says, but he too looks down at the water, muddy. What does he see? “Don’t worry about it, Lincoln.”

He won’t, he knows. He will not doubt John’s dedication, or the ease and certainty at which he offers himself up. John doesn’t say anything eloquent about the future here, or about the past. Men like them don’t get easy futures or easy pasts, and they have both, _both_ , now finally, decided that they’re fine with that.

“The first time I saw you, I knew,” John has told him, earlier. Lincoln can’t remember what question he’d asked him, was drunk or hurt or half asleep, but he remembers the certainty with which he had delivered the answer. John now, next to him, watches the horizon, intense and determined. He knows that John has something more to do, something he hasn’t told him about yet. He knows he will, and he will ask Lincoln to help, whatever he says to the others in the meeting, and Lincoln will be free to do with his loyalty whatever he wants. And he knows what he wants.

He looks down at the water again, imagines it clean, imagines it healthy and soft and warm. Blue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i can tell i've gotten a name or the timeline wrong in this one or left a sentence unfinished or something, but i've been staring at it for forever now and just needed to get it off my hands. hope you liked it, thanks for reading!


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